At the beginning of his History, for which he was gathering the material in the middle of the 5th century, the Greek writer Herodotus tells us what Persian men of learning had to say about the first confrontations of Europe and Asia, and for a moment in his whimsical way he conjures up an illusion of a living tradition of Persian historical scholarship. But as we read on we discover that it is to the Greek legends that their critical acumen is being applied; the Persians have no contribution to make from their own side; and in the event we find that there is no evidence of a native Persian literature in Achaemenian times, still less of a library of texts such as Ashurbanipal had built up at Nineveh. Stories of course grew up round their historical figures, for songs with a narrative content formed an important part of Persian education; and we can gauge the inventiveness of this oral tradition from the fact that Herodotus claims to have known four different versions of the tale of Cyrus the Great's origins and many different ones of his end. But it was not until Sasanian times that anything purporting to be a national history came into being, and even that by our standards was legendary.

The one ancient Persian document we possess which gives a narrative of historical events, the “res gestae” of Darius I inscribed about 520 B.C. on the cliff face at Behistun, is unfortunately confined to a period of a year or two, and it seems to be directed as much towards self-justification as to historical truth.